i love it during group ayahuasca ceremonies, there is sometime a moment, when the trip is strong, that i like to think of as a spiral or a vortex. every participant are having there individual trip, although they are sharing the same place. but comes a moment where these individual experience start to spiralize between one an other, merging toward an invisible center. then the ceremony starts to turn into a kind of spaceship of inter connection. everything becomes synchronize, and people sing or do or say things just at the right moment, it is lovely to watch, seems like an elaborate dance. the individual minds are connected in an egregore and it is this beautiful feeling of community. after this kind of ceremonies i feel connected to the participant at a very deep, intimate level, sometime feeling in a odd way closer to them, who are sometime complete stranger ,then from close friends i haven't have this kind of experience with. it is like we share a secret, we've seen the naked gnoses, we've seen each other soul. to look like this deep into one an other soul during an ayahuasca ceremony is a kind of connection that can feel more intimate then to make love.
skilled shamans are expert in manipulating this spirallizing waves, getting the force to be individual and purgative and then turning it collective and extatic. i have heard ( although have never seen it myself) of shamans who are able to suck a difficult vision out of someone body and take it in there own, to then blow it out of the space, or even take a vision from one participant and project it into an other. the santo daime is a set and setting really built toward construction of such egregore, with it collective singing, uniforms, collective dancing, and the simple fact that the concentration rituals happens worldwide, twice a month, so that every daimista of the planet can participate of the same trip, sort of. it is a ritual that in my opinion aims at erasing the individual ego into the supra consciousness that is the daime, or juramidam, the spirit of mestre irineu who became the daime itself. but in doing so it tends to erase the more personal and dark aspect of the ayahuasca experience of one facing his own shadows, handling his fears in a journey of dying before death that must be taken alone. in sufism it is often says that god as two aspect, a terrifying masculine side and an ecstatic loving feminine side. a good ayahuasca ceremony is like breathing, inhale exhale, it must bring you toward the two face of god, confronting your inner obscurity alone, being under the earth, in the deep, and then collectively and victoriously becoming one with the group, ecstatically merging in a being one that is unconditional love . there is a Brazilian ayahuasca song that i like that says ayahuasca come from the earth, come from the earth and goes toward the sky. one cannot shortcut the experience of loneliness and helplessness to go directly to heaven, it is a battle that need to be won, ceremony after ceremony, because we can only penetrate into this space of being one when walking with the truth, and walking with the truth means challenging our fear, to accept to be alone.
i also think that there is a deep magic involve with this kind of ceremonies, and the people that participate are there because they are suppose to. it is like a chain that bounds people together, and the snake pass from one person to the other, putting in synergy people fear, trauma, dreams and hope towards a collective healing. everything happens as it is supposed to, and one need to trust the medicine. it is not uncommon for example, that the master of ceremony feels sick just at the right moment, where the participant he is watching upon are doing fine, so that he can go and vomit without it being a problem for the work being done. when i am in ceremonies where i have this role of being upfront, canalizing the waves, i find that the ayahuasca let me be very concentrate and focus, very often with lesser visions then when i am in a ceremony where i don't have this responsibility, but with a greater intuition. and when the medecine hits hard, it is generally in a moment where the other are doing fine, or when there is somebody in the ceremony who have the experience and is in condition to takeover